How to reduce your website’s bounce rate

How to reduce your website’s bounce rate

Once you’ve created your website and its gone live, the whole world can see your products and services. Gradually, you’ll start to get visitors to your website but visitors don’t always mean sales. Once you’ve got people to your website, making them to stay is crucial. Unfortunately, many a website has fallen at the final hurdle, a frustration when you think your website is brilliant. As many people don’t know what’s causing the problem, we’ve written this blog post to help you find out and remedy the issue.

What is a bounce rate?

Your bounce rate is the number of visitors who’ve left your website after only visiting one page. This means they’ve typed a new URL, gone back or closed the window. Every single page has a bounce rate whether that’s your ‘about us’ or ‘case studies’ page. Despite this, the bounce rates that are usually most important are those of your landing page or another page you’re trying to drive people to. The higher your bounce rate, the worse the issue. If your bounce rate is 10 in every 100 (or 10%) that’s good but if your bounce rate is 90 in every 100 (or 90%), you certainly have an issue you must attend to.

You can find out your bounce rate by using Google Analytics, a fantastic free tool that tells you all sorts of fascinating information relating to your website such as how many people have visited a certain page and how long they stayed on your website. You can find it for specific pages by going to behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. Analytics shows you this as a percentage but it will give you a good idea how well that page is doing.

Why’s my bounce rate so high?

To reduce a bounce rate, you first have to diagnose the issue. Here’s some things that could be wrong:

Your website is unattractive: No matter what you’re selling, you need to make sure that your website looks the part. If someone visits your site and it’s overloaded with stock images or nauseating colours, visitors are unlikely to stop for long.

Irrelevant/too much content: If someone is visiting your website and there’s so much information on the landing page they don’t know what you want them to do, they’re unlikely to stay long. It needs to be clear what a conversion is so that the person can easily do it. People are unlikely to look around a website for long if they can’t find what they’re after.

Difficult to use: If a user decides they want to have a look around your website, if they cannot find out how to navigate it or they can’t due to malfunctioning buttons, they’re going to leave quickly!

Reducing my bounce rate

Reducing your bounce rate can be simpler than it first appears. Here’s some steps you can take to reduce your bounce rate and earn more conversions:

Create a landing page to satisfy the user’s needs: If you’ve directed visitors to your website to purchase a certain product, make sure that product is the predominant feature on your landing page. This means they cannot go wrong when looking for it as it’s right in front of them!

Include a call to action on your landing pages: Including a call to action on your landing pages makes it perfectly clear what you want the visitor to do. If you want the user to subscribe, include a button that says subscribe so the user easily knows that to do.

Have an appropriate appearance: If a predominant feature of your website is stock images or the colour scheme is nauseating, changing these images and colours can reduce your bounce rate significantly. Don’t have boring colours and no images, just make sure they’re not going to overload the viewer.

Create content that won’t take long to comprehend/read: This is similar to creating a landing page to satisfy the user’s needs but it’s also important that the content isn’t too much to understand in a short amount of time. For example, a few lines are much easier to read than a few blocks of text. Make sure the content is comprehensive but concise at the same time!

We are a web design agency based in Batley, West Yorkshire and have been developing, designing and delivering great looking websites for over ten years now.

We specialise in e-commerce, content management systems and all in one Business Solutions and our search engine optimisation services have a proven track record in achieving high search engine rankings for our clients.